The idea that the president is betraying his rhetoric by acting like a president in the face of unprecedented obstruction shows exactly how empty "centrist" rhetoric has become.

One of our Beltway fave-raves, Ron (Keep Up The Fight) Fournier of the National Journal, is back with another survey of the deplorable fashion in which politics keeps getting involved in our politics. Like the veteran journalist that he is, Ron gets right to it in what we call the lede.

Who's at fault for the looming Homeland Security Department shutdown? Everyone in power.

Holy hell.

President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders punted on immigration reform while controlling the White House and Congress in 2009 and 2010. Choosing politics over the policy, they wanted immigration as a point of attack against the GOP in the 2010 midterm elections.

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How many times do we have to hit the hoary myth of how the president "controlled the White House and Congress" with a shovel before it stays in the unmarked grave it deserves? The president had a nominal veto-proof majority in the Senate, where all the easily reached chokepoints are, from his inauguration day until Ted Kennedy died in September of 2009. (And even then, there was Joe Lieberman and the rest of the faux-centrists.) Then, of course, Scott Brown got elected and blew up even the nominal veto-proof majority. For all of 2010, the president was pushing a train up a dirt road to get anything done, the Republican party having made it quite clear that it would resist with all the tools available anything this president wanted to do. They didn't have to want immigration as an issue in the 2010 midterms; the Republican Base pretty much handed it to them, much good did it do them, by the way.

Just weeks after voters repudiated his administration in the 2014 midterms, Obama granted temporary relief from deportation to more than 4 million illegal immigrants. He did so without congressional approval, despite warnings that such action might be illegal and would almost certainly worsen polarization and dysfunction in Washington. (The fundamental promise of his 2008 election was to break gridlock.)

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Another candidate for the unmarked grave. Yes, the president larded his speeches with unifying rhetoric in 2008. It was what the country needed, having been bogged down in the "fight" that Ron Fournier cheered on Karl Rove for "keeping up," and having the economy melt down in real time just as the election was heating up. But the idea that the president is betraying his rhetoric by acting like a president in the face of unprecedented obstruction shows exactly how empty "centrist" rhetoric has become. And, if you needed further evidence.

The leaders in both parties are pandering to their bases, which makes compromise and common sense almost impossible. The Democratic Party is getting more liberal. The Republican Party is getting more conservative. The open-minded middle of American politics is growing bigger-but also increasingly disillusioned, silent, and marginalized.

That is analysis so shallow that an ant wouldn't drown in it. What is the evidence that the Democratic party is "getting more liberal" in equal measure to how conservative the Republican party has become? (What's the Democratic equivalent of the national hysteria over Agenda 21 or Common Core? Who's the Democratic Jim Inhofe or Joni Ernst in the Senate? I am keen to know.) And what does the "open-minded middle" -- yet another beast from Fournier's mythical menagerie -- have to do with the transparent attempt by House Republicans to knuckle the president on his completely legitimate executive order by jacking around with the Department of Homeland Security? (You will note that Fournier elides the fact that it is Senate Republicans who are more thoroughly on the hook than the president is, and that they were hung up on the hook by their Republican colleagues in the monkeyhouse.)

If DHS shuts down this weekend, it almost doesn't matter who get blamed in the short, medium, and long terms. Both parties will be failures. Again.

And of course it matters who gets blamed. It matters in the politics involved in the balance of powers within the government. If the extremist majority in the House of Representatives is able to break the president's power with maneuvers such as the one they've tried here then, I guarantee you, measures vastly more bizarre will come bubbling out of that fever swamp, and everybody, including the open-minded middle, will be submerged in them. The consistent inability to recognize the modern Republican party for the bag of nuts it has become is a true phenomenon in American journalism.